Cloudcast alumni Christian Reilly is back (see Episode 3) to talk about his many travels to the world of tradeshows (Interop, GlueCon, RailsConf), cloud management and APIs.
Aaron jumped in to tell us about his "mud run" in the fall.

We start the discussion by talking about Managing Hypervisors and Infrastructure (single cloud) and then expanded it into ways to manage multiple cloud (public, private, federation between clouds, cloud governance).

Next we talked about the challenges of automating legacy infrastructure and applications vs. how next-generation Enterprises (Zynga, NetFlix, etc.) are able to leverage newer automation tools (Chef, Puppet, etc.) for their environments vs. scripts and batch files. This led into a conversation about the continuing consumerization of IT (or at least user-demands) and how IT can embrace this to avoid continuing creep of "shadow IT". Christian also introduces the concept of "eventual consistency" for webscale cloud designs.

We spent time talking about APIs and Christian brought up a great distinction between being a "consumer of APIs" vs. being a "provider of APIs" and how his business is looking at both aspects to deliver services to their users. We talked about the pros and cons of API standards, including Rodrigo Flores comments (from Episode 10) and some practical best practices for today's APIs (REST, JSON, OAuth, SAML). We touched on how companies like Apigee, Mashery, 3Scale and Twillo are doing an awesome job documenting and supporting their APIs, which is making developers happy and eager to use their APIs.